All About My Mother (no 46)

(Spain 1999 101m) DVD1/2

Aka. Todo Sobre Mi Madre

Children are not made in a day

p  Pedro Almodóvar  d/w  Pedro Almodóvar  ph  Alfonso Beato  ed  José Salcedo  m  Alberto Iglesias  art  Antxón Gómez 

Cecilia Roth (Manuela), Marisa Paredes (Huma Rojo), Penélope Cruz (Hermana Rosa), Antonia San Juan (Agrado), Eloy Azorin (Esteban), Toni Canto (Lola), Candela Peña (Nina), Rosa Maria Sardà (Rosa’s mother), Fernando Fernan Gomez (Rosa’s father), Carlos Lozano (Mario), Cayetana Guillen Cuervo (Mamen),

There had been hints in Live Flesh that Pedro Almodóvar was achieving a hitherto sense of maturity in his work.  But what made his next film seem all the more astonishing was not that this newfound maturity was so plain to see but that he did it with the very same sort of characters that populated his earlier, extravagant sex comedies.  I mean, the plot is the sort of thing the working class Yorkshire playwright played by Graham Chapman in that immortal Python sketch might write about if his writer’s cramp would only go away. 

            Manuela, a counsellor at a local Madrid hospital specialising in organ donation, finds her private life imitate her work when her young son, Esteban, is tragically killed on the night of his 18^th birthday when he is run down by a car chasing after another vehicle taking away the star of the play he’d just seen as a birthday treat.  Turning her back on her life, Manuela runs off to Barcelona, from whence she had fled 18 years previously to have her son.  She intends to look up her son’s father, Lola, a transvestite formerly called Esteban, like his son.  In doing so she befriends her old transsexual friend Agrado and her friend Rosa, a nun working in a shelter who, it transpires, it pregnant with another child of Lola’s, and that both are HIV positive.  In addition, Manuela looks up the actress, Huma Roja, who she saw that fateful night in the very same play, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, she once played Stella in herself many years previously.  She then befriends not only Roja but Roja’s heroin addicted co-star and lesbian lover Nina. 

            You see what I mean – nuns, homosexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, junkies, AIDS, you name it, it’s here.  Yet we care about these characters so much more than their superficial predecessors because for all the surface falsities, there is one thing, as Agrado says, that is real about them and that’s their feelings.  In the past the outlandish eccentricities would have taken hold like gangrene and dragged the film down to the level of merely watchable camp.  There’s something a whole lot deeper going on here, and if it owes much to All About Eve (and how hilarious it is to see that dubbed horribly into Spanish) it owes equally as much to Minnelli, Sirk and Cukor’s The Women. 

            Essentially it’s about following your heart, or your son’s, as Manuela quite literally does before making her escape.  Or, as Maria said in The Sound of Music with the sort of sentimental schmaltz that Almodóvar would have approved; “when the lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a window.”  Here we have a tragic-comedy worthy of the title, and if Victoria Abril and Carmen Maura aren’t here, everyone else who matters is, with Paredes superb, Cruz so fragile you want to wrap her up in bubble-wrap but also with arguably the best line in the film (“Prada is perfect for nuns”), San Juan irreplaceable as Agrado and, best of all, Roth stunning as Manuela, holding the whole thing together with a solidity and finesse that make us wonder why we haven’t seen her given such opportunities before.  Such is the depth of feeling, of humanity, that Almodóvar invests his rag-tag of woman, the audience has been put through the wringer by the end of proceedings for here’s a film that, through all the tears, sums up the emotional battering of life with Agrado’s simple berating of her returned friend; “I like to say goodbye to the people I love.”  The film is dedicated to numerous actress, famous and otherwise, and to all mothers (could the evoking of the very name Stella also reference the eponymous mother played by Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas?), including Almodóvar’s own (note that young Esteban’s fateful birthday is, like Pedro’s, 25^th September).